Uzma Quraishi, Ph.D.

Education

B.A., English, History, with Secondary Education, University of Houston, 1993

Biography

Dr. Quraishi’s areas of interest include the history of the recent United States, immigration, race and ethnicity, urban history, Houston, and the South Asian diaspora.

Her primary research project focuses on Indian and Pakistani immigration to Houston, Texas. The book manuscript is entitled “Making Houston Home: South Asian Immigrants and Racial Formation in the Post-Civil Rights Era” and relies on archival sources, census data, GIS mapping, and oral history interviews. It traces the formation of immigrants’ racial identities from before to well after migration through the lenses of the Cold War, community building, residential segregation, and school selection. The study proposes an “epistemology” of immigrants’ racial sense-making processes, but more broadly, reveals the subtle ways in which racial hierarchies lingered and were re-constructed after the demise of Jim Crow segregation in the American South.

Her second project examines the formation of national consciousness among diasporic Indian subjects in the declining British Caribbean. The manuscript, titled, “The Long Reach of India’s Partition: Indo-Caribbean Reconstruction of Nation, Ethnicity, and Religion” is currently in progress.

For the 2016–2017 academic year, Dr. Quraishi holds the Summerlee Fellowship for the Study of Texas History at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center. In 2015, she was appointed Scholar-in-Residence at the African American Library at the Gregory School.

Prof. Quraishi teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history with a specialization in immigration and ethnicity. She also serves on comprehensive examination and thesis committees for students who share these interests.

Courses

Undergraduate:

HIST 1302 United States History, since 1876

HIST 3379 Recent America, 1945-present

HIST 3382 Immigration and Ethnicity in American History

Asian American Experience

Graduate:

HIST 5375 United States History, 1876-1933

HIST 5376 Contemporary America, 1933-present

HIST 5097 US Urban and Suburban History

Selected Publications

“Making Houston Home: South Asian Immigrants and Racial Formation in the Post-Civil Rights Era” (book manuscript currently in progress).

“The Long Reach of India’s Partition: Indo-Caribbean Reconstruction of Nation, Ethnicity, and Religion” (book manuscript currently in progress).